WHAT IS EiABC?

November 23, 2012

The Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC) was officially inaugurated on March 6, 2010 as an autonomous operating teaching and research facility in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In 2005, a nation wide effort was started to introduce a unified Bachelor and Master system in Ethiopia and with it establishing international recognized curricula in the field of Architecture, Urban Planning and the Engineering disciplines. From that date on, the Department of Architecture at the ETH in Zürich, Switzerland played a very important role as a strategic partner in introducing new academic structures, pedagogical concepts as well as a capacity building program which continuously supported the exchange of faculty and students between the two institutions. In 2008/09, the strategic concept of the establishment of autonomous operating IoTs in Ethiopia was co-developed with the ETH Zürich and led to the installation of the founding Scientific Director of EiABC Dirk E. Hebel coming directly from the faculty of ETHZ. The cooperation continues in project partnerships and research activities, ranging from urban design research studios to prototypical construction proposals in full scale, always accompanied with academic and pedagogical training sessions. The ADDIS 2050 project can be seen as one of many collaborations in the field.